The show went by too quickly! It was fun and lovely. Thank you!

I just discovered your program a few weeks ago when you did the Elizabeth Taylor tribute and now I look forward to it every Saturday night. I won't leave the house until it is over. What a neat idea for movie buffs! Thank you!

Thank you for a night of fantastic, lovely music, and for the trailer, which brought back some beautiful memories!!!

Oops! My bad! I saw "Victorious Titus" and thought it was the entry-into-Rome sequence at the beginning. This is a slightly later scene leading up to Saturninus being declared Emperor.

How Sweet the Moonlight is gorgeous! I can see that standing along as a recital piece.

Mine girlfriend doth protest the bard's soundtracks be all too sappy. For my part I like them as the wind likes the waves.

The Branagh Hamlet is remarkable because it's got everything of the original in it. I disliked it for the cast. Too many "names": Charleton Heston, Brian Blessed, Billy Chrystal, Robin Williams, John Gielgud ... On the other hand, the Gibson Hamlet wasn't effective. Gibson's Hamlet seemed forced, and Helena Bonham Carter's Ophelia was too strong a character to become unstrung.

RE Gev, above:

My girlfriend is wondering whether an "ill fitting codpiece" is a source of pride or shame.

First read Shakespeare when I was seven. Dad had a book of The Tragedies lying around. My sister and I would take Mom's knitting needles and act out the dueling scenes from Romeo and Juliet. "Act out," indeed ...

Thanks for that info, Mr. Garland! Do you know if the lyrics were already there, waiting for a tie-in single? I haven't seen the movie, so please do forgive me if I think the song sounds like something created with pop music charts in mind. Oh great ... now other soundtrack "songs" like Vita Nostra in The Mission are coming to mind. I'd better stop ruminating and just enjoy the program!

Rota's Romeo and Juliet theme sounds as though it was written to lyrics. It has the impetus of language arranged in stanzas, not the emotional momentum of a dramatic scene. Structure is circular; there is no sense of development for the characters or plot. It moves nothing forward. In other words ... it's just a pop tune in simple ABA form. (Is it only three minutes long, like most pop tunes??? I should time it ... It "feels" about that long. Or short ... )

I love Shakespeare, so I'm looking forward to tonight's show! Please do allow me to add a link to the scene in Titus which, I believe, features the pertinent part of Eliot Goldenthal's score: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbpoG092YAQ&feature=related

Alas, the brilliance of the score did not, for me, diminish the unfortunate hilarity of the sight of armor-clad, post-Apocalytic Romans marching like vid-game characters with ill-fitting codpieces. What WAS the director thinking???

SHAKESPEARE was perhaps the greatest, most perceptive genius of all the arts, that the world will EVER know !!!
How fitting that composers should adapt his words to operas, dramatic overtures and tone poems, musicals, background music based on his poems, sonnets and plays and films and plays based on his life and oeuvre. Wagner, himself like Verdi and Berlioz and Chausson and Boito and Nicolai and Vaughn-Williams and AMBROISE Thomas, was an ardent Shakespearean.
Two of his earliest operas were based on Shakespeare plays: Die Feen on Midsummer Night's Dream and Das Liebesverbot on Measure for Measure.